As an immigrant, while living two continents away from where I was born, I have always been interested in exploring the gradients of distance and gaining some kind of comprehension about the complex and diverse ways of being, growing, and making meaningful and artful connections to the places, people, and things in distance. Living through this pandemic too, has added new layers to my conceptual and metaphorical understandings of distance. It has made me wonder about the desire to remember others at the edge of “the blue of distance” while experiencing this physical and emotional isolation and confinement more than ever.

Every evening, at 7 pm, I was surrounded by the noises and sounds that were falling into and penetrating the atmosphere of my living room from the open window. When hearing the sounds of applauds and cheering for the front-line workers, I actually could not see the image of people making the noises. Listening to these noises and sounds in the absence of the bodies while looking through my living room window, created a desire in me to somehow trace this very temporal moment; the moment of being alive, being among and in-relation to others in distance, being in this timeline together while apart. This became a way of counting the days for me. A way of marking the days of being alive, in this time, together and apart.

This collection marks the sky at 7 PM, almost everyday from Apr 20 to Jul 22, 2020 in Vancouver, BC. ©Marzieh Mosavarzadeh